The Crédit Lyonnais Collapse

How a State Bank Imploded, Taxpayers Paid the Price, and Modern Financial Bailouts Were Born

A bank so powerful it believed it could never fail.

A state so invested it couldn’t let it fall.

A collapse that rewrote the rules of modern finance.

In the 1990s, France’s largest state-owned bank imploded in silence.

Crédit Lyonnais was not just a financial institution—it was a pillar of the Republic, backed by political power, elite technocrats, and the absolute certainty that the state would cover any loss. When reckless expansion, hidden subsidiaries, and catastrophic speculation finally surfaced, the damage was staggering: more than €130 billion in taxpayer money disappeared to prevent total collapse.

No executives went to prison.

No politicians paid the price.

And the bailout became the blueprint.

The Crédit Lyonnais Collapse is the definitive account of how political control, financial hubris, and institutional denial produced the first modern “too-big-to-fail” disaster—years before the 2008 global financial crisis.

Drawing on parliamentary inquiries, court records, investigative journalism, and insider testimony, Evan Blackmoor exposes:

• How nationalization removed market discipline

• Why regulators and ministers chose delay over truth

• How losses were hidden through accounting theater

• Why accountability stopped at the system’s edge

• How Crédit Lyonnais became the prototype for permanent bailouts

This is not just a French story.

It is the origin story of the financial world we live in today.

For readers of Too Big to Fail, The Big Short, and The Panama Papers, this book reveals how democracy learned to rescue power without controlling it—and why taxpayers are still paying the price.